# Lawrence P. > Founding Engineer at Variance (ex-Stripe) Location: San Francisco, California, United States Profile: https://flows.cv/lawrencep ## Work Experience ### Founding Engineer @ Variance Jan 2025 – Present | San Francisco, California, United States Building B2B SaaS again (after Stripe), but now with AI agents. Really interesting technical challenges in both product and infra! ### Senior Software Engineer @ Stripe Jan 2022 – Jan 2025 | San Francisco Bay Area Worked as a tech lead on Stripe's Revenue Platform / User Billing system — a mission-critical & data-intensive distributed system in an extremely complex business domain! We own one of the largest (in terms of throughput) and one of the most critical online data platforms at Stripe, the real-time revenue source of truth and attribution engine for the entire Stripe suite of products, down to the transaction-level accuracy and explainability. Some highlights: - Led a P0 effort to re-architect the low-latency revenue attribution engine's architecture (15k+ RPS) and data interfaces to mitigate a existential scalability bottleneck — collaborated with internal data infra teams, led technical discussions with multiple staff+ engineers across the data infra org. - Led an effort to re-architect Stripe's invoicing pipeline (a P0 system that debits billions of fee records a day). Increased the system throughput by 100x — eliminated the scalability bottleneck which de-risked onboarding many high-profile large enterprise Stripe customers. - Owned a critical slice of Stripe's accounting SOX compliance roadmap. Worked directly with internal and external stakeholders (Deloitte, EY) to scope out and implement SOX controls. ### Software Engineer @ Stripe Jan 2021 – Jan 2022 | San Francisco Bay Area Stripe Connect / Accounts API and Infrastructure Some highlights: - Worked closely with end users to roll out multiple breaking changes in order to make Stripe Connect compliant with India Data Locality laws — unblocking Stripe's launch in India - Productionized accounts-srv, one of Stripe's first high-throughput, low-latency JVM-based micro-services. - Managed and mentored an intern — he successfully completed the intern project, earned an return offer, and eventually accepted the offer. ### Software Engineering Intern @ Stripe Jan 2020 – Jan 2020 | San Francisco Bay Area Worked on Stripe's KYC / Compliance Platform — the platform / rule engine that allows legals to express specific compliance rules for a particular financial product (eg. Stripe Issuing) in a simple DSL, which gets translated into Stripe merchant onboarding requirements and risk rules. The domain was extremely complex — sitting in the middle of legal, product launches, risk enforcement... Had the pleasure to work with Drew and learned a lot from him (https://www.linkedin.com/in/drewhoskins2/). I worked on the DSL authoring interface — came up with and rolled out a new abstraction that significantly simplified the compliance plan authoring experience. My internship designation was GE (greatly exceeded expectations), highest performance rating for interns (top 2%) ### Software Engineering Intern @ Facebook Jan 2020 – Jan 2020 | Remote Worked on Ads Events Infrastructure. Contributed to a revenue-critical stream processing system as part of Facebook's Ads feedback loop (impression/conversion -> training -> serving). Specifically, I migrated a revenue-critical and high-throughput (1.5GB/s) C++ streaming data flow from an untyped JSON-encoded stream, to a typed schema-aware Thrift-based data stream. This was one of those change-the-engine-while-the-plane-is-flying jobs. The difficulty was way beyond an intern project, but I still managed to complete the migration without incidents (surprised and delighted the team). This decreased CPU utilization by 22% and eliminated significant tech debt (stringly to strongly typed). Specifically: (1) Independently proposed and executed a significant refactor of the downstream stream processor to move its deserialization logic behind an interface (touched 8k+ lines of C++). This made the migration a lot more testable and much safer. (2) Scoped, designed, and implemented a custom testing system to detect discrepancies between the two data flows before shifting traffic to the new one. (3) Rolled out (in phases) the new data flow two weeks before my internship ended without causing any outages or revenue loss. ### Software Engineering Intern (Data Infrastructure) @ Twitter Jan 2019 – Jan 2019 | San Francisco Bay Area Worked on the real-time compute team (stream processing and interactive querying). Built a system (implemented in Scala) that made Presto and Hive at Twitter PDP-compliant (PDP = privacy and data protection). Added support for end-to-end exactly-once processing semantics in Apache Heron by implementing a variant of the two-phase commit algorithm. Details in design doc linked below. ### Software Engineering Intern (Cloud Infrastructure) @ PlanGrid (YC W12) Jan 2018 – Jan 2018 | San Francisco Bay Area Worked on the cloud infrastructure team that operates the deployment and orchestration infrastructure on AWS (Kubernetes and Spinnaker). Implemented centralized authentication and path-based routing in PlanGrid’s Kubernetes cluster using Envoy and Istio. This greatly improved security and developer productivity. Built Spinnaker pipelines to allow phased roll-out for ingress-related infrastructure changes. Contributed to the effort of instrumenting distributed tracing to improve visibility. ### Software Engineering Intern (Time Series Database) @ Datadog Jan 2018 – Jan 2018 | Greater New York City Area Worked on the low-latency time series data ingestion pipeline (Metric Intake team). Took ownership of the time series creation service written in Golang by ensuring its availability and resiliency. Migrated the service's inter-process communication layer (40k requests per second) from Datadog's in-house RPC framework to gRPC, which significantly improved the service's fault tolerance. I also designed monitoring systems, benchmarks, and chaos testing to further ensure the stability of that service. Implemented resiliency patterns, such as circuit breaker (from gRPC), exponential backoff, RPC deadline and cancellation, to protect against cascading failures. ### Software Engineering Intern (Buyer Experience) @ Universe.com Jan 2017 – Jan 2017 | Toronto, Canada Area I worked closely with product managers and product designers to implement and A/B-test numerous business-critical user-facing features using Rails, MongoDB, and React. For example, I implemented many different types of embedded Universe widgets that unlocked many new enterprise deals. I took ownership of the code-base. For example, I took the initiative to upgrade React Router to the latest version, so we could set up code splitting, which significantly reduced page load time. I also upgraded Flow Type to the latest version to support code generation for the GraphQL API. This greatly reduced programming errors. I also worked with the platform team to release Universe’s public GraphQL API. I built and shipped Universe’s first single page application that consumes the new GraphQL endpoint to production. ### Software Engineering Intern (Plot Editor) @ Plotly Jan 2016 – Jan 2016 | Montreal, Canada Area At Plotly, I built front-end features on top of a large-scale browser-based "plot maker app" built with React & Redux. I was a key contributor to a business effort to increase free-user-to-pro-user conversion. I worked closely with a product manager, and developed a framework to make plot maker features Pro-only, to increase free-tier-to-pro-tier conversion. ## Education ### BCS in Computer Science University of Waterloo ## Contact & Social - LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/lawrence-pan - Website: http://lpan.io --- Source: https://flows.cv/lawrencep JSON Resume: https://flows.cv/lawrencep/resume.json Last updated: 2026-04-05